Luis:
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the DistantJob Podcast, your podcast about building and leading awesome remote teams. I am your host, as usual, Luis, and with me today is Daphne Lafore. She is the host of the Remote first podcast and founder of Modern Leaders. She is on a mission to help executives, people, ops, and teams leaders drive a company wide shift to our remote first ways of working. Welcome, Daphne.
Daphne:
Thank you for bringing me in the show. It’s super nice to be here.
Luis:
It’s awesome having a fellow podcast in here, right? The fellow podcasts are in here. I get too few of those and there are not enough of us in doing the remote niche properly. Of course, we were introduced by Pilar, which also has an awesome podcast.
Daphne:
A wonderful podcast. Yeah.
Luis:
Was one of the first that I went on. So, yeah, I do love her show and we do try to create a nice, interesting ecosystem of shows that people can listen in to learn how to do remote work better. Now, of course, this show, as you know, focuses on team building and management and leadership. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to ask you, how did remote work come into your life and how has it shifted your career trajectory?
Daphne:
Well, remote work started really early in my career. So I’m 33 now, my age, and I think in 21 or 22. So it was in 20, 12, 13 that I got into that. But mostly because I tried to find a way to be able to continue traveling, because I love traveling. I’m always around the world. And I didn’t want to just use my holiday classic holiday time to discover the world. And at that time I wanted to find a way to mix work and travel and I just dig into remote work as a way to work. So I kind of started my career with the skills of, okay, I’m good in management and marketing and all those things. How can I actually mold my career around that and grow my career while being able to travel? So I started getting just some gigs, like that time I was kind of just talking a lot about the vision of wanting to do that and was lucky to get one of my first gigs and then slowly it build up that way. And I became a product manager. I wrote for fully remote companies and ended up having now over ten years of experience working in operational roles, product roles in fully remote teams. So, yeah, it’s really part of my core. So it didn’t really change my career trajectory. I think it kind of defined it of like how, how my care is today and what I’m, I’m able to do today. It’s very important in my life. It’s really like, definition of who I am, I would say.
Luis:
Yeah, I actually got a lot of questions right about how I do this. I was originally a dentist, so the farthest thing from remote.
Daphne:
Wow.
Luis:
I did work as a writer right. While I was in med school. Right. So I have a side job to help pay for faculty right. For the university. And that was as a writer, which is a much more comfortable remote job. But yeah, people do ask me a lot. How do I do that career shift? Because people I meet, a lot of people that feel that they really want to have something like you did. Right. That they want to travel, they have this vision for themselves about getting to know the world and doing it on holidays definitely feels a suboptimal solution. So a lot of people ask me about it, and I feel that I don’t have a lot to say about it because I mostly winged it. I wonder if you winged it as well, or if you came up with some sort of strategy that you could share. What actions did you take to embark on this trajectory? And I’m putting you on the spot, of course, as is the nature of this show. If you just winged it at me, feel free to say so.
Daphne:
I mean, I was young. I was, like, basically just out of university. I didn’t even finish university, actually. I was studying university at the same time as working and sometime leaving for a semester and coming back at the time. There’s a part of it as a strategy in the fact that you put your mind into something and you say, this is where I’m trying to go. This is what the objective is, and then, how can I do that and talk to as many people as possible? Was my strategy to like, okay, it seems like this is only something at that time that is made for technical people that are designers, web developers that work in the computer industry. The marketing aspect looked like it was something made for bloggers. It was feeling really unachievable, like unaccessible. But I was trying to task people about, I’m trying to get into this. How can I make my work work online and see if I can find a job? And in a way, there’s a way that I winged it for the first experience, because by talking a lot and networking, I got my first gig that way. And then I was able to start in one company where I actually grew a lot, like, just my skills in general, and started to work in marketing and operations and internationalization of a product and something. So I gained a lot of experience that way, then slowly started to get other gigs and then started the freelance economy a little bit. But I always had a strategy of I don’t want to just find work to be able to travel. I want to grow my career because I was, of course, like, early 20s. You kind of want to see that okay, I’m going to grow also as a professional, not necessarily just kind of having gig jobs, but actually feel like you’re actually building a career. So I did that when I decided to move towards a fully rerolled company. At that time, I want to join a company that is embracing that mindset of working online. And that was in 2015 where I joined a fully remote company for the first time and then that continued to grow and I also grew myself as a product manager there. So it kind of evolved that way and it just became also an obsession for me. At that time, the way we work was an obsession for me. I just wanted to learn more about how we can influence other companies to embrace remote work as a business strategy and not just like as a perk, but actually as a decision for their company. This is pre COVID. So I was very excited by the topic, very almost an evangelist remote work at the time. And then when the pandemic hit, I was just kind of there to answer any questions people have to how to handle that change. And I was actually very excited by that change. I was like so cool. This is going to transform the world. This is what I’ve been expecting and wanting for my whole life. And this is happening right now that people are actually understanding and switching. So it’s been very cool journey, definitely, but it’s kind of like half and a half. You wing it all the time, I think, when you try to do things.
Luis:
Yeah, that’s an important part right. Of it when I started, right, I would rather be a writer, right. Because that’s what I enjoyed the most apart from dentistry, right. Was writing. But I was flexible, right. When I had the opportunity to get marketing roles and stuff like that and I took it and I’m like, well, I guess I’m learning marketing now. Right. Sometimes it’s easy to overestimate how much the remote world is still in an embryonary stage is still building. Right. It still is a matter of though you are helping, obviously. And I like to think that I’m helping too, more and more of companies becoming remote. The reality is that for someone that wants to get a remote job now, specifically a remote job, I think people still need to be a bit willing to fit in the spaces that are available instead of trying to find remote job that’s exactly like the job they had before. But remote, some people might be able to do that. Certainly some certainly developers can do that much more easily, stuff like that. Right. But I do think that we’re still in a stage where there are specific remote roles that need feeling more than others, if this makes sense.
Daphne:
I think in general there are a lot of remote work opportunities and in today’s age, I would say there are so many remote remote work opportunities or remote jobs available. It’s so easier now to apply for jobs. I would say it’s easier than ever to apply. So there’s loads of jobs now. Before, it was really hard, actually, I had to really search specifically, like, which company. Now there’s job sites that have specific filters for that. It’s very easy to find roles. But the competition is much bigger now because everybody exactly tried remote work. And now everybody has the experience of remote work because before, like three years ago, I might have been one of the only experienced remote worker. And if you were a remote company, you want somebody maybe who already worked in the remote environment. Not everybody experienced it. So you can no longer just say, like, yeah, I’m very experienced, I already know what it is to work remotely. No, you actually need to promote yourself as your own roles and expertise and compete with whatever, this market that you’re competing with. So it’s no longer we’re hiring in Berlin, we’re hiring all over EMEA, are you the one? So I say the competition is much higher. So there’s a lot more jobs, but the competition is much higher than it was. So it’s kind of like, now I have so much more opportunity to apply to many jobs, but not necessarily more chances because a lot of other people are applying.
Luis:
Yeah, got it. So you focus a lot of your effort. Let me know if this is wrong. Right. I’m going off my notes, but feel free to correct me at any time, if necessary. Right. You focus a lot of your efforts in getting companies on board. Right? Now, some companies obviously are automatically on board. Some companies are created remote first. But it does seem to be part of your mission to get more and more companies to adopt remote work. What does that look like? Right. First, what brings companies to approach you? Right? And once they approach you, what does that look like?
Daphne:
So I no longer try to convince companies. So before, it’s kind of like pre pandemic, it was a lot about convincing people about how it’s the best strategy for you or et cetera, et cetera. I no longer do that. So now when company approached me or somebody approached me to be a coach or advised in the team that they are working, and I’m always asking, is the leadership, is the executive team and the leadership team already vouching for that mindset of remote first, or does it need convincing there? Because it’s not my job anymore to convince these companies that want to come work with us. They already have to be in the mindset of them being modern leaders, so they know they want to become modern leaders that are like, at the level of the new worlds of work. So they come and work with us through workshops and advisery to solve different problems that they have or challenges that they have with this new mission that they have for their company. So people that come already have the idea of like they want to make their maybe they are hybrid and they have an office, but they want to make sure that their experience, the experience of the employees are equal equitable, no matter if they are in office or if they are remote. So they come and maybe we work together on that or a massive amount of work that I do is around asynchronous operations. I can’t say operations, people know it more around asynchronous communication, but people have been hearing a lot about that recently, and they try remote work for two, three years, and now they’re like, okay, we want to level up how the way we communicate to be more efficient working in different time zones. We’ve been hiring people from other countries. We actually want to be better at this on how can we actually put a strategy together to work efficiently towards all our operations, all our different functions in the company asynchronously or synchronously, but basically really setting up a structure that people can grow and get better at working collaboratively, effectively together? If it makes sense. No, I no longer convince companies to say you need remote work to make things work. You come to me because you already know that and you want to level up what you’re doing, what you’ve been doing.
Luis:
So you mentioned modern leaders, which obviously is the title, is the name of your company.
Right.
Luis:
But how would you define a modern leader?
Daphne:
That’s a good question. So a modern leader today is someone who’s very aware of how the workplace or the way we work is changing and that this leader needs to adapt and level up the way that they are communicating collaborating with their peers with their team and how they can better support their team to do the best of themselves, the best work they can do in the new digital world. Basically, the fact that we are now recognizing that work is no longer a place, but it’s actually digital. And then even if you decide that you have an office or you don’t, you still work in a digital environment. Everybody that even those who goes inside of a space will work in a digital world. I always call it that way because it’s just accepting that the modern world is now digital. And no matter where you are, you’re always going to be working online. And you have to learn how to lead teams in that environment. Where there’s no longer confirmed face to face, necessarily, and that they can evolve with the new ways of working.
Luis:
Yeah, okay, so that’s interesting. And you remind me of something that you said a little bit before that when you were looking for your own remote work opportunities, you did it, you started through a lot of networking, right? And now you’re talking about the digital world. Am I right in assuming that most of that networking was in fact digital as well.
Daphne:
Actually, it was a bit of both. At that time, LinkedIn was not very big. I’m very big on LinkedIn now, so I do all my networking remotely online. At that time, actually I was mostly talking in person. I was going to events that was about remote work, that was about maybe new ways of working in person. I would meet people in person. So I would actually do in person networking a lot at the time when I started mostly to kind of there is this need still. It’s very hard to network online and to have people really feel your vibe, your core. And when you are online and online it can be very superficial.
Luis:
Exactly.
Daphne:
And I still think that I need to have the in person, people need to meet me to really feel like if I was to try to as a consultant, there’s a lot of working online and people are a bit more open to the idea of that now. But it’s always better if they did meet me in person, then it will always close even easier. So I would still say that there’s a big part of networking in person that makes a big difference and actually going to running remote in Portugal. I know you’re in Portugal.
Luis:
Yeah, we’re likely meet. I hope we meet.
Daphne:
So I’m going to be facilitating a networking session, actually at running remote to help people connect and really use that opportunity to be in person, to share ideas and to keep in touch after that event and how these kind of events that happen once a year really bring people together and they really strengthen relationships. Like last year I went to the one in Montreal and for the first time I met people. I’ve been talking through LinkedIn for years. We were like people that I’ve been knowing for ten years, even that never met in person. And just that little two to three days, I’ve been changing completely my relationship with them. It’s been really like growing that relationship. And now we might chat on WhatsApp sending sort of voice notes, like there’s a bit of that strengthened relationship that happened there. So I’m definitely pro meeting in person once in a while and networking in person as well.
Luis:
Yeah, I’m very interested in online communities and that networking vibe. The problem I have with LinkedIn is that feels very fake. Right. The reality is that I think that a norm was set on LinkedIn that people tend to become faker versions of themselves, if this makes sense. Right. A couple of weeks ago I was working with a marketing company as a consultant and I was looking at what their best performing people were putting on LinkedIn, literally creating fake LinkedIn profiles, right, to sell for their clients. So this was completely fake manufactured people, and I wanted to see what they were doing with that I know real people with profiles just like the fake people. And I don’t think it’s because the fakes are getting good. I think that the way LinkedIn works incentivizes everyone to become a little bit fake. So I dislike that and I think that makes Remote work harder because it makes it harder to connect with our common humanity. I come from a very specific background. Like I said, while I was in med school, I was doing a lot of writing gigs to pay the bills and I did most of my writing gigs in the gaming industry. So I built kind of a parallel career in the gaming industry. And at the time that big thing was MMOs. To this day, I still try to bring a bit of that experience in MMOs where people really manage to Bound and create real lasting friendships across huge continents. And that’s the thing that I think that Remote work still hasn’t gotten to because as you said, we still feel the need to get together in a wonderful conference like running Remote, which I will certainly be attending and I hope to be part of your networking event. I need to figure out how to get in there. Is it something that you need to subscribe?
Daphne:
Actually, I think there’s like two different networks.
Luis:
You need to let me know.
Daphne:
But I think everybody will be able to join that. I think we might have one. It’s going to be a smaller scale one and then one is going to be like massive scale for everybody. Like pre party, I think. But it’s so important to network. I think that why conference happen when you go to conference. Yeah, of course the content is short, but people go there because they want to hang out, they want to meet other people like them. There’s a big part of it that is like, okay, you have the same mindset and you have the same problems you’re trying to solve. Maybe you solve something that I didn’t yet and I want to learn from you. And I think that I usually go mostly for the people I will meet than the actual content that is on there.
Luis:
Same. It’s the same with me. But again, I feel that there’s something to solve there because again, I met people online in video games that become some of my best friends and I only met them like five years after in real life. So that is definitely possible. But there needs to be some sort of structure in place and perhaps the place where you’re selling right is not the best place for that. And maybe that’s the problem, is that a lot of the spaces where remote workers go tend to become places for selling. Even if it’s just selling ourselves, selling our professionals.
Daphne:
You mean running remote?
Luis:
No, I mean online. Not physically. Not physically. Right.
Daphne:
Okay. I think LinkedIn at the beginning, people think it’s a selling platform, but it’s really a networking platform. Once you decide to stop trying to sell, what you’re doing on LinkedIn sales just come naturally because people follow what you do and they want to learn. You give a lot of information yourself, and you don’t say, like, hey, there’s an offer today, please join. Don’t approach this as a selling thing. It’s not where you sell. Even as a job seeker, it is not a selling platform. You have to share your knowledge there and contribute. Once you decide to become a contributor, it will come back to you as a job seeker, because the more you contribute, the more you will get detention that will give you that job that you want.
Luis:
I like that, but I feel that’s not my experience. Right. Maybe I’m connecting with people. I feel like I go there to see an inbox full of pitches. That’s what I feel.
Daphne:
Okay, so you get the kind of like there’s people that just send tons and tons of messages.
Luis:
Yeah, I get a lot of connection requests where I feel, oh, interesting, let me make a new friend. No, it’s just someone trying to sell me something.
Daphne:
Right. When this happened, I usually can see it from of course it happens, but usually you would ignore those. Or when they do this kind of first approach, I kind of delete the message.
Luis:
Exactly. It is a bit polluted, but again, I have no idea. Right?
Daphne:
Once you clean it, once you clean your LinkedIn, you do it. Right. It is a very powerful platform. Maybe I use LinkedIn more than any other social media.
Luis:
Maybe there’s an educational opportunity there. Right? Maybe you need to be teaching people how to make their LinkedIn into your real community. Right, okay, so these modern leaders, right, that come to you, people that come to you wanting to be modern leaders, what are the most common challenges that they bring to you?
Daphne:
Well, it’s been evolving over the years. So at the beginning, it was more of a panic mode where we just want to figure out how to do basic things. It’s like, okay, well, now we’re going to start onboarding people remotely, but we want to make sure that our brand is still as relevant that when we were doing onboarding in person. How can we make this onboarding experience as special as our brand is? So there’s something basic like this, or we need to write a remote work policy. So it was very basic. Or should we buy a printer for all of our employees and very silly things at the beginning. When I started consulting in 2020 for free, I did a lot of free stuff. I worked a lot for free at that time just to help out. But right now, it’s retransforming into leadership training. How can I be a better facilitator? How can I make my meeting those who I keep? Basically, which meeting should I eliminate to become more synchronous? How can I change my meeting into more asynchronous workflows. So like the same materials do every day, for example, every week. If I delete that, how can I transform it into another workflow? If I do keep a meeting, how can I make them engaging and be a great facilitator and make sure that people are actually listening and engaged in that meeting and their time is being worthwhile? And then after this, all of the things related to operations, this is really where I am the most. I would say my expertise is really around operations in remote teams and how we can better work together and effectively together. Where in my team, in modern leaders, we also have consultants that are working more on culture and belonging. Like creating fostering connection in remote teams or for example, like creating work from anywhere programs that are compliant. So there’s a lot of different levels that people come with different questions. Yeah.
Luis:
So you talked a bit about the kind of thing that I usually say, the one remote all remote policies right. Which is when even people in the office should be working as if they are remote work. Otherwise there will be a disconnect between the remote workers and the non remote workers. How much pushback have you seen against Fanny? Right? We are very social creators, right? Humans are very social creatures. It feels to be kind of hard. That’s why I usually advise when clients want say that they want to be hybrid, I always tell them that that’s definitely possible, but it’s the hardest part to take because if you put four people in the same room or set of rooms, they are naturally going to try to gravitate towards one another and do stuff together. Not virtually. So what do you usually advise right. When people want to go that route?
Daphne:
I think you’re right. The hybrid model is the hardest. The hardest of the hardest is when the companies are like, yes, we’re hybrid, but you have to be in the office these specific days and they kind of try to trap people into like yes, we’re flexible, but we’re not. So it’s definitely just psychologically for the companies or for employees, it is not working. So it’s just actually making it worse. It really feels like you’re holding them with a leash instead of actually trusting them. So if you’re choosing the hybrid method but the hybrid meaning choice, the flexibility of choice, so you choose, today I want to go to the office, today I want to stay home. Or maybe there is a specific activity that is organized, that is in the office where everybody’s going to come one day or every two weeks for a specific day that is special that everybody comes and it actually means something. So many people say, I go to the office to see these peers and they are never there. So then actually it’s useless for me to come. So of course there’s that kind of like think about why you’re using the office and how you’re going to use it and who’s going to come. And then once you figure that out exactly what you say, you have to train people to think remote first in the way that they are approaching work, the way they’re collaborating, the way they are communicating their things, the way they’re updating on statuses, that it’s not just like, hey, you know what, I did this thing. You’re aware I’ve been telling you in the corridor. So now you know. So it’s going to be no, how can I make sure that everything that happens is dated online so that other folks can be made aware of any upgrade, update in a project, a task that has been closed. What happened? Okay, this happened today. Blah, blah, blah, fixed, close my task and then it’s kind of open where everybody knows that what happened to that task. I talked to this a lot because I’m from the product world. So in product management, we work a lot with kind of the developer mindset where you have open issues and you update of other issues, you comment, you work directly in the issue. And I think every department should work that way as well. Having that kind of system where there is a place to collaborate online, everybody can communicate and have a discussion that is asynchronous and then once the decision is taken, it’s published and everybody can see that the evolution of that decision. Of course, documentation is put online. So I think you have to think remote first in digital first. If you don’t like the word remote, think digital first. Because some people just don’t like the term remote. They feel like it means far from the core and they still think too much location. So no, just think we are in a digital world, think digital first. So then you kind of get a bit more people on board. As you said, people are not getting on board or are they having pushbacks? Once you stop using the word remote and you focus much more on the digital experience now you start getting everybody on the leadership team once they understand that.
Luis:
Yeah, I personally think that I don’t know how companies work based on the I tell you that I did this on the corridor right model. It just seemed very inefficient.
Daphne:
So many companies are like that, it’s crazy. It’s most companies.
Luis:
Even if everyone was in the office, I would still like to have a single source of truth for what was done right, instead of relying on but.
Daphne:
The truth is that there is none of this. That’s what happened with COVID when people actually realize how bad their organization was managed. Because remote shows how horrible your structure is and how your communication gaps are like where all the gaps are. It’s just put up front on the surface. So that’s why people were struggling. They’re like, oh. My God. It’s impossible. We need to be in person. It’s because this is all what came up to the surface once. We’re actually not great at communicating. Oh my God. We’re working in Silos a lot. Like we don’t really know what each other’s department are doing unless we do a meeting in person or I see that customer success person on the corner and I kind of have the discussion that they talk to their team. It doesn’t happen the same way.
Luis:
Yeah. The founder here at Distant Job usually says that remote work is the ultimate test for your management. If you had problems in your management that were not obvious while you were working in a location, remote work will shine light on those problems very fast.
Daphne:
Oh yeah, 100%.
Luis:
That’s definitely a situation. Tell me a bit about your own work. What is the day in the life of Daphne’s work life look like?
Daphne:
I mean, right now I’m a bit in a kind of taking time for myself right now, so it’s very different than my normal days. Normal days is I’m very productive in the morning, so usually it’s like I get up, get the kids sorted, and then my first hours of my day are going to be the most productive. So I don’t want to waste those hours. It’s usually the one meetings on that time I don’t want things that are going to take my attention away. It’s really where I’m going to get the most focus. So it’s where I can do my deep work. And afternoons would be for meetings or other things that are just requiring a bit less dedicated focus. Where I want all my brain cells because I kind of go down the day goes I cannot really work in the evening. Sometime I will find like a burst of productivity in the evening once the kids are asleep, once in a while. But it cannot be work that has to be done on that time because otherwise I will just not be focused enough. But if I do get a good burst of creativity, I love the evening because I know there’s no end to that time frame because once you have kids you’re kind of always on a schedule of your schedule yeah. You cannot really use that creativity burst of like okay, right now tell me about it. The flow is coming. I feel like I can just deliver and you have to stop in a specific hours.
Luis:
Yeah, but there’s a kid crying in the background needing something.
Daphne:
No, the kids are not there. Definitely. This is impossible to work with the kids in the background, but it’s more like I have to pick them up at that time and I have makes an appointment. That okay. I have to be finished at that time. Where? In the evening sometime if I want to be creative. It’s nice because I can just go and go and go. Of course, I need to wake up at five in the morning so I won’t go too late. But I really like that. So that flexibility is quite good. So right now the thing I’m doing is I’m kind of in a bit of a I’m taking the quarter. The quarter one is just a quarter that I’m taking for myself. And I’m taking a private pilot license training to be able to learn to fly a plane.
Luis:
Oh, cool.
Daphne:
So it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life after childbirth.
Luis:
Childbirth is pretty hard.
Daphne:
Yeah. You know?
Luis:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know firsthand, but I was in the room, so I have an idea.
Daphne:
Yeah, but that’s really hard to see your partner. I wouldn’t want to be the partner looking at someone giving birth. It’s something very traumatic, I think, to be on the other side as well. Just see that. So I also empathize with that.
Luis:
Well, it was harder for my wife than it was for me, I guarantee you.
Daphne:
Yeah. Sometimes you can faint by looking at this too, because you’re not in the same adrenaline. But anyway, it’s another topic right now. I thought I would be kind of working as my consultancy at the same time, but this training is taking so much of emphasis that I decided to just close everything and just focus on that training for three months. And it’s been amazing. I’ve been learning a lot and I think that people need to do more of things outside of work and discover how you can redevelop your skills outside of your working hours. All the achievements and the growth, professional growth and work related skills don’t have to be all happening at work. They can happen after work on the side. This is what flexible work can really change people’s life because they can actually spend time on other dreams that they have that in the end might give them superpowers for their day to day jobs.
Luis:
I agree. Right. It’s another good thing about remote work that I felt right back when I was working as a dentist, I really enjoyed that work. That was very fulfilling work, but it was a big part of my identity. Right. And then when I started moving toward remote work and trying new things and writing, I started as a freelance writer. Then suddenly I had two skill sets and what I found as that, and then it was easier to transition to a third one in marketing. And now today, I feel like I really enjoy all the work that I’ve done so far. But that work doesn’t really define me as it defined when I really only add one occupation. Right. I feel that there’s a lot more. You are a human being with skills and you use and enjoy and profit from those skills, but the more skills you have, the less those skills are an integral part of what you are, if this makes sense.
Daphne:
Oh, yeah. No, definitely. Deck. Not everything what you said. You were saying, not everything you are is work. It’s not everything that is your identity is not just how you’re doing at work. You are somebody outside of work. And this is really important to remember that.
Luis:
Yes, I definitely do love the idea of you having your own airplane and piloting. It must be very freeing. Must be a great sensation.
Daphne:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great sensation, but it’s probably the most stressful thing. And I’ve been having this dream. There’s a dream of like, I’m going to fly my own plane and be like, well, so cool. And then there’s reality check about how hard it is and how actually stressful it is, because learning to fly is learning not to crash your plane and not to die. So they always put the self in all the hard situations so you can recover and know how to handle hard situations. So it is very stressful. Once you have two small kids, it’s like, you don’t want to die. You’re a mom. You have to make sure you come back alive. Yeah, it is quite stressful.
Luis:
So for me, it was voting, right. I really enjoyed learning how to vote, but people think it’s something that’s super relaxing. And yes, it can be super relaxing, but it is much more complicated than you see in movies and TV shows right now. I imagine adding a whole third dimension to that. Instead of moving in a plane, right. Having a full three dimensions of movement that feels like it’s probably very hard and overwhelming. So, all due respect to you and the people doing that now, I want to ask, becoming really a lot more grounded in many ways, what is your virtual office? You talked about the digital world, right? So what does your digital office, your virtual office look like?
Daphne:
Well, I’m always exploring new options. So on a day to day, I use a lot like Notion and Google Suite for a lot of the just day to day work, like communication, getting work done, putting things together. There’s so many tools. I don’t know, all the digital marketing tool I work in. When you’re an entrepreneur, you do loads at the same time. You do like, every single role in the company. Sales, marketing, communication, PR delivery, pitch. There’s so much stuff that you’re doing. But I’m actually exploring a lot that kind of digital HQ experience that you can have. And it’s really important to me to find that kind of experience, even for people that I’m working with, how they can have their team, their processes, the knowledge, the communication all in one place that can really feel like they can log in their company. And the closest I found to that is catalog. I don’t know if you know catalog. I think they were founded not that long ago. It’s Qatalog.com, so it’s catalog with a Q. And they really just focus on that experience. Of creating that kind of digital operation tool. And recently they actually added a new AI. So we know the whole AI generative, generative AI trend there is at the moment. So right now, any company, even a dentist actually, they have a really good example with dentists that would want to create digital workplace experience. Workplace experience. I’m just using jurisdiction now. They’re trying to create, for example, your dentist and say, okay, you will say, give me what kind of industry you’re in, how many people, or a description of what your company is, and I will generate a workplace experience. Or not a workplace experience, but more like an operation system for you, basically. So you write like dentists, like working with children, blah, blah, blah, and you explain a little bit. And then they might say, okay, we’ll generate a place for you to manage all of the files of all the different clients and then project management compared. So they will actually generate it for you with their system. It’s really impressive and it’s really like next level on how you can create a digital world for any industry, because any industry now will need to be more digital anyway. So it’s really like next level. So that would be like a good reference that I would give people. Definitely.
Luis:
Nice. Very interesting. So tell me about yourself and I guess that again, because you’re currently on that break, let’s go a bit farther and let’s say the last six months or the next year, what was the thing that you got right? App or tool or whatever that really made a difference in the way you work?
Daphne:
I mean, since I use Notion, it’s very changing how I work all my life and work life is on Notion. Everything I want to start something. I use notion. I manage my whole podcast on Notion. I manage all of my I have my CRM is on Notion. All of my clients, everything that is happening is on Notion.
Luis:
You really are a power user.
Daphne:
Yeah, it is very powerful. At the beginning, it just looks like another knowledge management platform that you just kind of like write documents in. But you can do a lot of hard coded stuff in there. So I think that Notion, you can do everything and build your website on that. You can send a link to people. It looks like a web page can have your domain link to that. It’s very powerful how you can also connect different database together. There’s a lot you can do there. And I think since I start Notion, it’s just completely different than there’s working with Notion, than pre Notion, I would.
Luis:
Say in my way of working, I’ve been resisting. Friends have trying to drag me into Notion for the longest time. Right.
Daphne:
Maybe I will be convincing you.
Luis:
I’ve been resisting ever since I was burned by Evernote. I became like, screw it.
Daphne:
Evernote is not like Notion. It’s like okay. I have to create a document instead of having to share a document with you on Google and maybe you go join it. It’s like I can just share you with Notion link and it’s just directly I have all the documents that is clicking through all the different other documents that are having to send you a folder. I don’t have to send you a folder, send you a web page. And everything is a link. So evernote is nobody. But it’s a bit more rare to have people that use Evernote. Like, you kind of need to be in the club now. I don’t actually use evernote. The way I use Evernote would be more of a note taking personally for me, like organizing my thoughts and things like that. But I wouldn’t use Evernote as an external tool where a notion I can use it internally and externally as well, like sharing a podcast brief. If you have, like, my bio, I want to send somebody’s asking, can you send us a bio? And I have a link with my photos, my description, everything. Like what I did, like a click link to where I spoke. Everything is there. It’s very easy to send.
Luis:
Yeah, definitely. Okay, so that’s definitely a glowing sold. No, it’s a big rabbit hole to go into, right?
Daphne:
Yeah.
Luis:
I’m still living in the snow again since Evernote burned me. I’m still living in the Stone Age and using my built in iOS notes. I know that sounds incredibly backwards, but that’s just how I work. Good.
Daphne:
If it works for you, it’s perfect. In the end, you want to create what makes work better for you.
Luis:
I try to avoid fancy, but the sirens call on Notion is big, right? Every week I have someone very into Notion right. Telling me that I should get into it. So who knows, maybe one day, right? Yeah, maybe one day. So tell me a bit about books. Do you usually gift books? And if you do gift books, what are your most gifted books?
Daphne:
If I give books like myself, rarely. I actually don’t have time to read books I’m like. I tried all the time to find.
Luis:
No, I’m sorry, I meant gift. I meant gift gift.
Daphne:
I mean the giving books. Maybe I’m not a great maybe I’m not a great gifter. I don’t have anything that comes to my mind right now. I think I gave something recently, but it’s not related to work. It’s just related to personal growth or something like that.
Luis:
Let’s try this. What books have influenced you the most, if any?
Daphne:
I mean, I’m an audible kind of person, so I listen to books a lot. And this year I respect that. I started with a very classic that start with Y by Simon Sinek.
Luis:
Oh, yeah. Popular one.
Daphne:
Because yes, popular one. But I never read it. And then I was like, with all the work we do and trying to work towards the remote mission or things like that. Why do we do what we do and really come back to the ground of why we are working every day and why we’re working towards a specific goal? So it was kind of something that I think that was quite relevant for me, where I was mostly at the end of last year. So that’s the recent one that I’ve listened to.
Luis:
Did you figure it out? Did you figure your why out?
Daphne:
Yeah, I would say in the end, my why never really changed. My why always been that I want to enable companies to create a workplace where people can actually choose where they want to be, to have the freedom to mix life and work and have the best life, like what I’m trying to do for myself. So it’s never really changed. The why behind everything I do for even the past ten years, even with everything I tried, always comes back to that.
Luis:
I like that. Right, okay, so I want to be respectful of your time, and we’ve been going on for a while. So just in closing, I wanted to ask you a different question. So let’s say that you are organizing a dinner, and in attendance are going to be people from very big companies from all over the world, people that will have a big say in the future of work. Right. Here’s the twist. This dinner is going to have a roundtable about the future of work, and you are going to be hosting the dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Because you are the host, you get to pick the message that comes inside the fortune cookie. What is your fortune cookie message?
Daphne:
Don’t overthink this.
Luis:
Okay, that is a good one. Don’t overthink it. Don’t overthink this. Would you like to expand on that or shall we leave it?
Daphne:
I don’t know. It’s kind of the first thing that I was it’s the first thing that came to my mind because I was like, okay, wait, Chinese. And then it’s like, you want to do the right, perfect answer for that cookie. And I’m like, don’t overthink it. And then it’s like, well, in general, don’t overthink it. Just kind of understand the future of work is not to be overthink. We don’t have to overthink about the future of work.
Luis:
Sounds great.
Daphne:
We are in the future of work with it. The work is just evolving. Just go through it and go through that process and don’t overthink it.
Luis:
That sounds lovely to me. Okay, so definitely it’s been a pleasure having you. Why don’t you tell our listeners, where can they continue the conversation with you and where can they learn more about the remote first podcast and modern leaders and what you could do for them?
Daphne:
Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much for bringing me on the show. It’s been super cool to be able to be on the other side. Can find me on the remote first podcast. Any platform will have that podcast spotify as the most popular one, but you can also go on Remote First FM if you like to go directly on browser. We have different guests from all over the world, from different large companies just in general, sharing their experience and their transition to remote work. So that might be interesting for you. And you can join me on LinkedIn. I’m really happy to chat. As I said, I’m a power user of LinkedIn, so definitely lafay on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me there DM me if you want to continue the conversation and if you want to learn more about modern leaders. It’s Motherleaders Co, so that’s also an easy one to reach. So it was really nice to be there. Thank you so much, Lewis, for inviting me.
Luis:
It was my pleasure. And I guess we’ll see. I hope we’ll see each other in running Remote. Let’s make that happen.
Daphne:
Yeah, of course we will.
Luis:
Yeah. Thank you for being a guest.
Daphne:
Thank you.
Luis:
And thank you for listening to The Distant Job Podcast, your podcast about building and leading awesome Remote teams. See you next week.
Luis:
And so we close another episode of The Distant Job podcast, and if you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners. And the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me, and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well. You can also help a lot leaving reviews on itunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to Distantjob.com Blogpodcast, click on your favorite episode, any episode, really. And subscribe by subscribing you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form. And of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great Remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country, look around the whole world, because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. And to help you with that, again, Destinjob.com is the perfect place to start art. You will tell us who we need and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate 40% faster than the industry standard. And with that, I bid you adios. See you next week on the next episode.
